WWL TeeVee reported last night Jan Mann DID NOT resign……

And this folks is a stunning turn of events given that every media outlet reported she went out with her former boss Jim Letten.

I bet these are interesting times indeed on Camp Street. There has to be a reason Mann is staying because I can’t imagine she is very popular with the gang given her misrepresentations in two high profile cases cost her boss his job. Whatever the reason it looks to be the act of a completely selfish person from the outside looking in.

I comment regularly on nola.com. I try to post coherent, fact-based opinions in my comments. I do not use inflammatory rhetoric, and I try not to make unwarranted speculations. I had tiffs with both Perricone and Mann under their pseudonyms many months ago, but some of those comments have been deleted. In the past several weeks, the moderator(s) at nola.com have taken to deleting the majority of my comments, and some of them have been fairly innocuous. In addition to stifling the conversation, the removal of certain comments leaves some responses out of context. If you go back and read the comments in chronological order, some of them don’t make sense. The moderator(s) of nola.com is clearly sniping my comments, yet I have no idea why. Has this happened to anyone else? Thanks slabbers.

I looked back after you mentioned it the other day, and I had the same experience in terms of an exchange with Perricone here (nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2011/09/us_labor_secretary_urges_joint.html#comments). Sal said, “You must love living in ignornace,” I told him to make sure he could spell it, and this reply is recorded in Heebe’s discovery: “I-G-N-O-R-A-N–C-E. If either of you MENSA’s understood latin, which is doubtful, the casus belli means the justification for war, not the cause or material facts for going to war. Now, who is ignorant? Is that too nuanced for your puerile intellects?”

That comment is gone, as is my reply explaining to him why his Latin grammar was unacceptable (he had originally said “Bellum Causa, indeed”). Also, it looks like another of his comments (“Adversus solem ne loquitor …. Don’t debate when you’re not equipped for the challenge”) is also gone.

One of two things suggests itself: uncivil reply and replies thereto were removed for that reason, or some of comments were lost in the comments transition. The selective nature of removal hints at the first in this instance, but that’s just a guess. As to you, THAT is a mystery, in all seriousness.

P.S. on this nettlesome subject: A number of inconvenient remarks on the nola.com “Roundtable” announcement were zapped yesterday, including mine (“I believe Ricky’s trying to interest us in a journalistic version of used cars. Do I gather you’re not in the market?”). By any normal standard, comments like that would pass muster, but if you post anything like that where they don’t want it to be posted, out it goes. That’s been happening to me since the transition. :_)

HA! I had to look up “astroturfer,” but that’s the mot juste all right; I can see he annoys some folks, but I like his enthusiasm. About your Roundtable comment, I wouldn’t be too sure because they’ve pruned the thread again– maybe nola.com hired Fred Radtke to protect Ricky’s feelings, and as so often happens to Radtke (and Ricky too, most probably) I already see new uncomplimentary graffiti on the freshly painted thread. :_)

Of course I’m rude enough to be mentally sorting through the other comments now you mentioned being there, but I’d never be rude enough to ask. You sneaked right past me, at any rate.

It is very rare I comment on NOLA or the SH but occasionally I am so moved. In my heyday on the stock boards I could carry around 3 sock puppets on a message board and make it stick. I thought about offering a commenting course once honest to God but since Perricone and company have been unmasked I realized it would have been far too advanced for 95% of the people commenting on forums like your favorite local blog.

I’ve financial blogged with a high ranking city official (Mayoral) from one of America’s 10 largest cities, senior managers in several fortune 500 companies, University Professors and extraordinary ordinary people like my old friend Russell1200 along with the paid promoters and bashers. When Jarvis DeBerry wrote not long ago that he ignored the comments to his articles I was absolutely flabbergasted. The comments make the story IMHO and I have done my level best to translate all that I learned on finance to here on Slabbed.

It has been a long time since I did the Sock Puppet thing. When the commodity is ideas instead of a financial position using Socks is self defeating IMHO. I well understand why people need anonymity but that is another post.

In the AZ post “Pirates Parley”Jason told the local establishment they were throwing their money away on traditional PR. It looks like some of his readers took his admonishion seriously. Sal and company poorly executed the plan.

I see: finance. Thank you, because I think that clarifies. :_) I really never considered the possibility of the paid chorus or the one person using multiple identities to push a viewpoint before, because the only people I know of on nola.com who maintain different user accounts simultaneously are mentally disturbed (but then they’re pretty obvious). Every now and then at election time people sign up just for the purpose of promoting a candidate, but the only ones I ever suspected of being paid for the purpose belonged to John Georges (and boy, was he ever not getting his money’s worth, but they made wonderful figures of fun). :_)

I was very surprised when Oyster demonstrated that Perricone was using two accounts to support one view on the same nola.com thread, because I just didn’t see the point; it seemed so stupid. If one is making money thereby that’s a different matter, but that wasn’t why Sal was doing it. But you’re suggesting Sal & co. were engaged in a PR campaign?

That explains some of what I’ve read, but they were SUCH asses, Sal in particular– very limited knowledge and used words of which he was only dimly aware of the meaning, sometimes to comical effect. I wouldn’t have thought him much of a pitchman. But if Letten sent the gang out typing on nola.com, that would explain Jan Mann’s inexplicable refusal to decamp quite neatly.

I’m looking at the AZ post, and he mentions “pathetic astroturfing attempts.” Do you mean people seriously think steed is being paid to drive almost everyone nuts after the fact of Letten’s professional demise? Here my imagination fails me altogether, because if steed were a commenting missile aimed at Letten, he’d be completely mistimed. And Letten is what he discusses. What a new world you have opened up for me; I’ll have to revise my opinion on a whole segment of past history. :_)

I am suggesting Sal was running his own private PR campaign. He clearly felt something was missing in the public discourse and as you observed he poorly executed on his plan. What moves a man in his position to do that? I have my own opinion but no formal expertise psychology thus I won’t bore anyone with it.

I enjoy Steed as the guy/gal clearly has a talent with the written word in an environment with constant repartee albeit a large portion from the lunny bin. And now that people are becoming hip to the scene the speculation about the comments will take on its own life. I’ve found it is accretive to cyber value.

James A. Wells, Assistant U.S. Attorney General: You had a leak? You
call whats goin on around here a leak? Boy, the last time there
was a leak like this, Noah built hisself a boat.
……….
James A. Wells, Assistant U.S. Attorney General: We can’t have people go around leaking stuff for their own reasons. It ain’t legal. And worse than that, by God it ain’t right.
………
James A. Wells, Assistant U.S. Attorney General: What’d you figure you’d do after government service, Elliott?

Elliott Rosen: I’m not quitting.

James A. Wells, Assistant U.S. Attorney General: You ain’t no Presidential appointee, Elliott. One that hired you is me. You got thirty days.

I agree Sal as an espontaneo makes more sense, because he didn’t feel constrained to pay homage to Letten. He seems disgruntled at being relegated to the sidelines in public, as in these examples: 2010: “When is the public going to wake up…. Letten doesn’t do the work, just takes the credit. The men and women of the US Attorney’s Office are the silent hero’s,” “Hey Letten, if you like the TV camera so much, why don’t you tell Mitch who to hire???

2011: “Another Letten news conference?,” “Letten is great for taking credit for other people’s hard work. It is the assistants and agents who do the work and should be congratulated”).

! “Bore,” indeed; not a chance of that. If your question is “What moves a man in his position to do that?,” then I’d guess it’s because Sal wanted his share of the spotlight; he envied Letten’s rock star status. He didn’t seem to notice that status degraded the dignity the office should hold, which I think is why Letten ended up with a very silly Wikipedia entry (which even referred to his “Justache”).

Agreed steed’s a good guy to have around; he’s made up a funny board game & given everyone representative tokens, which has lured even those who don’t like him to join in. :_) On accretive value, YES, which is why I hate the fact nola.com broke the old commenting system and rendered most old comments inaccessible to searches. They’ve missed umpteen thousand page views on that account, and they’re avoiding the subject of bringing old comments into the new system.

The problem is this: page and comments load separately, in that order, and a search function would need to wait for the comments to arrive, then figure out how to access them. Simple automated searches are very easy in Visual Basic for page text, but these pages use an embedded commentsloader routine. Do you have any idea how to tackle it? Collecting threads from old pages on which known USAO accounts commented would make it much easier to locate friends of, which seems to be the parlor game du jour.

Bless your heart for introducing yourself– I thought it was you, but I was afraid it would be bad manners to say so. I LOVE “Sockpit,” too; something about that word broke me up completely. To tell you the truth, I thought about the whole nola.com comments moderation issue a long time ago, because the move to advance.net made it clear in which direction they were moving (closer scrutiny).

I realized any comments I posted there were no longer under my control, and the same held true for my identity (which no one would care about if they did know, actually). That doesn’t stop it from being annoying when legitimate remarks disappear. But sometimes they forget to check, because I see the last piece of rebellious graffiti on the Roundtable wall is still up. :_)

Remember the wedding scene in Beetlejuice, where Beetlejuice slapped the zipper on Barbara’s mouth? That’s nola.com, when they get rolling.

Hello, lockemup! As you can see, I don’t know much, which is why it takes me so long to say anything– it takes me forever to think about a subject, and I have a bad tendency to type out each excruciatingly slow step. But thank you very much. :_)

The search problem I know less than nothing about, worse luck. And given what’s going on the problem continues to recur, because until the commenting scandal draws to a close I’ll keep wanting to search that comments section.

I actually giggled when I typed Sockpit too, but not a girly giggle; more of a manly giggle. They really snipe me now at nola.com. Sometimes it’s immediately and sometimes it’s quite a long while after I comment. It’s never that I’m saying anything so profound or inflammatory; the moderator/censor just seems to dislike me. It started in earnest when I was posing questions relative to potential payroll fraud by Piyush Jindal based on the documented 25% of his salaried time being spent out of State, mostly campaigning. It’s a legitimate question, or so I thought. After that, it was like I was the bad kid constantly being put in time out.

For my money, you are one of the top, if not the top commenter on nola.com. The moderator of slabbed TRULY believes in free speech, so I never have that problem here.

That is very good news for me, because I have the greatest respect not only for your opinions but also for the way you phrase them, and I rely upon your legal expertise (an area in which I’m altogether lacking). I do remember when the problem started– I think it was this story (nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2012/10/gov_bobby_jindals_out-of-state_1.html). It’s very disturbing to think they’d do that– does not bode well for the site as a whole.

About Sockpit: I was padding around in my Lamos yesterday saying it periodically. It’s even funnier when you enunciate the consonants: SocK PiT, as in “this is less of a sock drawer than a sock pit.” (Lamos are moccasins with “Lamo” stitched on the heel, which cracked me up when I opened the box.)

And you’ve done it to me again, because I’m now trying to produce something that would qualify as a “manly giggle,” and getting nowhere fast. :_) BTW, this is exactly the type of post that was being removed in June, because I just looked at the e-mail I received when I asked why a thoughtful conversation had been zapped in mid-discussion:

“I removed those comments in response to the question, ‘Is there a contest to report the news first?’ because it was completely unrelated to the story about two shootings. This is enforced throughout the site

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